"Does the Tiger Eat Her Cubs?"
With that provocative question based on a Chinese proverb, a lesson plan devised by researchers at San Diego State University challenges teachers and students to launch a "web quest" exploring whether children in Chinese orphanages are being mistreated. The American students will split into teams, each of which will venture on to the Internet in search of answers. They will review reports from Human Rights Watch, read the transcript of a British television documentary, see the Chinese government's response, analyze arguments by an American journalist who fears the controversy will prompt China to close the door to more foreign adoptions, and study an article in the online journal Asiaweek suggesting that China's policy of limiting families to one child each is actually creating a society of "spoiled brats."

Next, after consulting an online primer on consensus decisionmaking, the student teams will come together to hammer out a collective judgment from this sea of information. Even then, they won't be finished. After reading Congressional Quarterly's online profile of their representative in Congress, they'll express their views in email to the lawmaker and, perhaps, the president of the United States. Or, they'll send email to the editor of One World, a British website that carries reports put out by Human Rights Watch and other think tanks and nonprofit groups.

This could be the future of education. As envisioned by computer advocates and education reformers, it's a future in which the walls between the classroom and the outside world have disappeared, where children are exposed to complex, real-world issues, challenged to sift through the raw materials of the Information Age, and empowered to communicate their ideas to a global audience. In this enriched environment, the theory goes, the authenticity of what they're doing will motivate students to acquire the sophisticated thinking skills needed to live and work in the twenty-first century.

A vision for the twenty-first century schools

Where it has caught on, this approach to education can be exciting. Consider these examples:

* In Mendocino, California, math students at Mendocino Middle School study linear and exponential patterns of growth by experimenting with population simulation programs they download from Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Based on these programs, they prepare reports for state and foreign governments on the likely impact of population changes on demand for public services.

* In Cranford, New Jersey, students at Cranford High School have designed a website that details a fictitious murder case. As they describe each step of the legal process, they present detailed fact sheets explaining the underlying legal principles. By the end readers not only have been treated to an interesting story, they have also absorbed a comprehensive primer on the entire U.S. judicial system.

* In Pullman, Washington, students at Sunnyside Elementary School learn about linguistic and cultural differences by exchanging artwork with their peers overseas and discussing the results by email.

* In Boulder, Colorado, students at Centennial Middle School work with their peers at schools in three other states and Canada to produce an electronic newspaper expressing their views on contemporary issues.

In all of these cases, students are assuming more responsibility for their own education. Instead of absorbing an established body of knowledge delivered to them by teachers, they are developing skills to seek, sift, analyze, and convey information themselves. Instead of studying discrete academic subjects, they are addressing real-world concerns in an interdisciplinary way. Instead of studying in isolation, they are working on teams. And instead of merely regurgitating what they have learned back to their teachers, they are communicating their findings to a much wider public.

Source: QED's Internet Usage in Public Schools, 2nd ed., 1997.

Teachers who have embraced these methods are overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the results. Among other things, they revel in the abundant resources computer networks bring into their classrooms. Over the Internet, notes education consultant Margaret Riel, students can interact with exhibits at a museum, take a "tour" of the White House, aim a telescope into outer space, or "visit" cities around the world. They can find electronic penpals (known as "keypals") or join kids in classrooms around the world to pool data on such common concerns as water quality. They can connect with mentors outside their schools or consult with experts on everything from geology and math to classical music and fine arts. And they can follow along as scientists, explorers, and adventurers mount expeditions to earth's most remote areas.

Such real-world connections are powerful motivators for students, teachers say. "The kids are learning better," notes Bart Hays, a teacher at Morse High School in San Diego. "I'm constantly reassured every time I put them on the computers. They're so excited, and they get so much done. Their attitude toward the entire class changes."

Joyce Brunsvold, a reading teacher at Fairland Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland, sees a big gain in both the quality and quantity of student writing since her students became Internet publishers. "Kids know parents or teachers are going to say, `Good job,'" she explains. "When a stranger sends email commenting on their work, it means a lot to my students."

"The kids are learning better. I'm constantly reassured every time I put them on the computers. They're so excited, and they get so much done. Their attitude toward the entire class changes." --Bart Hays, teacher, Morse High School, San Diego

Not only does technology help students extend themselves outside classroom walls, it helps adults connect with classrooms to help kids. People who otherwise wouldn't have time to serve as mentors to kids find that they can correspond with students by email. And working parents, whose schedules can make conferring with their children's teachers a logistical challenge, can connect more readily through email or by direct phone connections to classrooms.

But advocates say that new technologies can be used to do more than make school fun or help busy parents reach teachers. As they see it, teachers can use Internet-based explorations as part of an entirely new approach to education that is more appropriate to the world students will face as adults.

Traditional classrooms--with their strong central authority, carefully prescribed curriculums, 55-minute classes, homogeneous student groupings, and emphasis on rote learning--may have trained children adequately for the old-style mass-production economy, analysts say. That was a world in which products changed relatively infrequently, work typically was organized according to a strict division of labor controlled by steep hierarchies, and individuals were expected only to master relatively discrete and simple tasks that they performed repeatedly. Often, they held such jobs for years.

In the Information Age economy, however, businesses must innovate and customize their products constantly. Because hierarchical workplaces can't adapt to changing market conditions rapidly enough to survive, authority has increasingly devolved to self-directed, interdisciplinary teams. Frequent job changes have become much more common. This environment places a premium on workers who are flexible, innovative, self-directed, and able to solve problems collaboratively.

"Certainly it is a much more expensive and slower process than anyone anticipated." --Beverly Hunter, program manager for educational technology systems, BBN Corp.

In his 1991 book, Work of Nations, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote that most schools are failing to teach the creativity, problem-solving, and lifelong-learning skills required in the new economy. In the typical classroom, he argues, "reality has been simplified" into prepackaged lesson plans, lectures, and textbooks, leaving students little occasion to find meaning for themselves. For instance, he says, "the tour through history or geography or science typically has a fixed route, beginning at the start of the textbook or the series of lectures and ending at its conclusion. Students have almost no opportunity to explore the terrain for themselves."

The same year that Reich wrote those words, a report by the Labor Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills suggested that workers in the future must be able, among other things, to "work on teams, teach others, serve customers, lead, negotiate, and work well with people from diverse backgrounds." The SCANS report, as it was known, also said that the workplace of the future would require the ability to "acquire, organize, interpret, and evaluate information and use computers to process it."

Of course, education involves more than teaching children how to survive in a changing job market. Equally important, say educators, is helping students develop means of making sense of today's information-rich environment. Knowledge is changing so rapidly that teaching an established body of facts is of little value. Instead, schools must give students the skills to make sense of what Reich calls "the chaos of data that already are swirling around us."

"In 1850 it took about 50 years to double the world's knowledge base," notes Frank Withrow, former director of learning technologies for the Council of Chief State School Officers. "Today, it takes only a little more than a year. The way we store, retrieve, and use information is vastly different in the Information Age." Modern society, Withrow said, "does not need `knowers,' it needs `learners.'"

Barriers to success

So far, however, this vision remains largely unrealized outside a small handful of schools. Even the staunchest advocates of computer networking in education concede that in most places technical problems, inadequate training, and insufficient time for teachers to figure out ways to integrate technology with the curriculum have combined to thwart the dreams of reformers for a technology-driven overhaul of the education system.

" Certainly," says Beverly Hunter, program manager for educational technology systems at BBN Corp., and a veteran in the education-technology field, "it is a much more expensive and slower process than anyone anticipated."

There are a number of reasons progress has come more slowly than innovators like Hunter expected. For one thing, the technical challenges have proven daunting, as anyone who has lived through the installation of a computer network in the workplace can testify. Businesses generally assume that computer networks require one technology specialist for every 60 users. By that standard, schools would need the equivalent of one specialist for every two classes. But few schools employ any computer technicians at all, even though schools are less able than most businesses to withstand the disruption that system failures and other startup problems can cause.

"If a teacher has planned a science curriculum using technology and the system crashes, she doesn't have time to figure out what's wrong--particularly when she has 30 kids bouncing off the wall," notes Tom Carroll, director of the Technology Innovation Challenge Grants Program at the U.S. Department of Education. "The system only needs to crash a few times before the teacher isn't willing to spend any more time on it."

Cultural attitudes pose even bigger obstacles. The push to connect classrooms draws much of its strength from a belief that students learn best by taking on meaningful, authentic tasks and discovering the truth for themselves. In the reform model, the National Academy of Sciences says, teachers "change from being the repository of all knowledge to being mentors who help students navigate through the information made available by technology and interactive communication. They help students gather and organize information, judge its value, and decide how to present it to others."

Appealing as this approach may sound, it runs against deep-rooted beliefs--including notions that "teaching is telling, learning is listening, [and] knowledge is subject matter taught by teachers and books," Stanford University historian Larry Cuban has noted. It also defies powerful practical considerations--namely, that a relatively small number of teachers have to maintain control of large classrooms of children who come from diverse backgrounds, he says.

In an influential 1993 article, Cuban predicted that efforts to introduce computers into schools would fall short of reformers' hopes, just as experiences with motion pictures, radio, and television had disappointed earlier generations of technology enthusiasts. After an initial gush of enthusiasm, these earlier technologies all ended up being used far less than proponents had envisioned, and the traditional structure of schools remained largely unchanged: knowledge continued to be seen as consisting largely of concrete subject matter that can be broken into discrete segments and conveyed piecemeal from teachers to students.

There are ample signs the pattern is indeed being repeated. In many schools computers sit idle much of the time or are used for passive, rote learning through drill-and-practice routines rather than being used to cultivate higher-order thinking skills like synthesis, analysis, and communication. And in many cases teachers and students don't seem to know how to take advantage of their newly obtained network connections. "Thousands of schools are getting wired, and all the students are doing is surfing the web," says Roy Pea, director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International Inc., in Menlo Park, California. "There are very few educational activities." Pea worries that members of the public will grow disenchanted. "I'm worried about NetDay hangover," he says.

Aimless surfing and a preoccupation with what's "cool" have led some to conclude that education-by-Internet is more glitter than substance. In an April 1997 letter to the Wall Street Journal, Bruce R. Buxton, headmaster of the Falmouth Academy in Massachusetts, called the drive to wire the nation's classrooms a "national policy disaster." The Journal had described a project in which eighth-graders in Bayonne, New Jersey, pulled down National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite images showing the path of the Gulf Stream. Such "seemingly harmless but gaudy" exercises, said Buxton, represent "Disney education: clean, wholesome, and passive."

"At the first national conference we held, everybody wanted to know about funding and hardware. Now, many of the questions focus on curriculum, educational policies, and equitable use policies." --Connie Stout, director, Texas Education Network

Critics also argue that technology enthusiasts have their pedagogical priorities all wrong. All too many network-based teaching projects, the critics say, confuse access to information with real knowledge, and mistakenly elevate the capacity to compile data above the ability to analyze and understand it.

"Isolated facts don't make an education," wrote Clifford Stoll in Silicon Snake Oil, his 1995 critique of cyber culture. "Meaning doesn't come from data alone. Creative problem-solving depends on context, interrelationships, and experience. . . . And only human beings can teach the connections between things."

Theodore Roszak, who decried the growing use of computers in school in his 1986 book, The Cult of Information, agrees. "The idea that children need more and more information is wrong," said Roszak in an interview. "Children need a graceful way of dealing with whole ideas. They need to know how to talk about them, write about them, and make critical judgments about them. That's what they find in books and other people's minds. It has nothing to do with points of fact."

Technology and school reform

Perhaps surprisingly, teachers who have been working with technology for some time say that critics like Roszak have a point. They, too, say that by itself technology won't improve student learning. But they say that it can be a very useful tool if accompanied by other school reforms.

Back in 1986, Larry Cuban was chiding computer advocates for failing to consider social constraints on schools. "Unless existing classroom and school settings are altered substantially, much beyond the conventional will be tough to attain," he wrote in his book, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920. "No computer advocates that I have read or heard, for example, have suggested that schools should hire more teachers and adults to reduce the teaching load, bringing it closer to the college [staffing level] than to the factory. No computer advocate urges increasing school district budgets by half to modify the existing school and classroom arrangements concerning class size, governance, training, and teacher collaboration. Their sole recommendation is to put money into classroom computers."

But now, a growing number of computer advocates are addressing the kind of broad education reform issues that Cuban said they were neglecting 11 years ago. "At the first national conference we held, everybody wanted to know about funding and hardware," recalls Connie Stout, director of the Texas Education Network. "Now, many of the questions focus on curriculum, educational policies, and equitable use policies."

Many teachers say that they need more time to prepare lesson plans and work collaboratively. Others stress the need for smaller class sizes--not because technology requires it, but because small classes are a prerequisite for quality education, with or without computers. "The ideas advanced in the literature converge on a central notion--that small, nurturing, personal schools, in which educational activity can be tailored carefully to individual students' needs and interests, are most effective and most compelling," say Joshua Reibel and Jennifer Hogan of the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University.

Some technology advocates also have started to re-emphasize education fundamentals. "The big problem I see is literacy--not computer literacy, but the simple ability to read and write," says Ferdi Serim, a teacher at John Witherspoon Middle School in Princeton, New Jersey, and author of NetLearning: Why Teachers Use the Internet. "If you put the Internet in the hands of somebody who can neither read, write, nor think well, you aren't giving them much," continues Serim, who says that some of the kids who come into his computer lab only know how to use the Internet to connect with the MTV website. "But for kids who are equipped with language and learning skills, it's like a rocket."

More broadly, technology advocates have begun to put more emphasis on finding ways to integrate networking tools with the school curriculum. In the past few years the number of lesson plans circulated on education websites and email lists has grown enormously. And education think tanks are devoting increased attention to defining the higher-order skills associated with reformers' ideas about computer networking in schools, and working to develop better tools for assessing students' progress in acquiring them. "We have been looking at computers so much that we haven't been thinking enough about what happens away from the computer. But that's where learning takes place," says Serim.

All these trends reflect a growing awareness that technology is not an end in itself, and that any successful use of technology must begin with clearly defined educational objectives. Thus in Baltimore, Maryland, the Abell Foundation has stopped providing funds for schools simply to install computers. "If they just want computer labs, we say, `No,'" says Kate Walsh, program officer for education. "But if they have a good program that could make good use of technology, we will support them. Technology doesn't drive a program, it's a tool."

Such views may represent a less grandiose vision for what computer networking can accomplish than many people held a few years ago. But advocates believe that a more balanced understanding of what technology can--and can't--do will help focus the public on the need to address issues that are more fundamental. At the same time, it could reduce the danger of public disillusionment and backlash against technology.

"This a very high-stakes game," says Serim. "We don't serve anybody by building up expectations beyond what can be delivered."

Last updated: 21 July 1997 jss
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